Cultural Differences: Part 1, Parties

Last Saturday I attended a Halloween party in Rossland. This was a fine opportunity to observe the locals in a time-honoured native ritual. I was a bit caught out because Halloween was actually on Monday, and I thought I had all of Sunday to prepare my costume (I was planning to go as a lounge chair). But people here are pragmatic about timing and the party ended up being on Saturday night. I cobbled together a costume out of things that were lying around the hostel, including a hat made from a pizza box and a T-shirt, but I felt a bit outclassed by the other costumes in the room.

1. When it comes to costumes, people here go all-out. Just about everyone dresses up: There were maybe ten people in the pub throughout the whole night who weren't dressed up (out of well over a hundred), and I suspect that they didn't realise the party was on until they arrived. But not only do people dress up, they also put heaps of effort into their costumes. This is not some lame-arsed "I'm just wearing what I normally wear, WITH THIS CRAZY HAT" costume event. One guy came dressed as a LEGO man, complete with gigantic yellow papier-mache head and hands. There were two girls dressed as Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum complete with roly-poly stomachs (and watching them dance in those costumes was awesome). There was a lady dressed as a jellyfish. It was nuts.
2. Nobody cross dresses. The men all dressed as man things, and the women all dressed as woman things (except Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum). If you had a costume party in Australia, you could guarantee that there would be a bunch of guys in drag. In fact I don't think I've been to a costume party at a pub or nightclub in Australia and not been in drag. I was certainly the only guy at this party wearing a dress (although I wasn't really in drag - it was part of my "robes").
3. People here stick with their costumes. It was pretty warm in the pub, and the dancefloor was packed, but the dude who was wrapped up in a blue foam mat didn't abandon his costume for a minute. In Australia, if people get into the whole costumes thing they usually turn up dressed to kill, but as the night goes on they typically revert to more normal clothing. Or they end up wearing bits and pieces of everyone elses costumes, which leads me to...
4. Everyone here wears their own clothes all the time. Maybe this is just a feature of who I end up with at parties, but in Aus there's always at least a couple of items of clothing doing the rounds among the crowd. Whether it's a particularly cool hat, or a wig, or a pair of hotpants, there's usually something being passed from person to person that you don't need a urine test to identify. Here, everyone enters, parties and leaves dressed the same way.
   
5. Over here, the character from the popular kids-book series "Where's Wally?" is called "Waldo". Some cultural barriers are just too big to comprehend.